Intel announced a significant update to its Xeon processor series during the Vision 2024 event announced. The company introduced the new Xeon 6 brand for its upcoming Granite Ridge and Sierra Forest processors. With this change, they aim to simplify the product portfolio and help customers better understand the Xeon series. First, the Sierra Forest and Granite Ridge models will use the Xeon 6 label and will be released soon.
The Sierra Forest processor can be customized for cloud-based environments, focusing on an architecture consisting of efficiency cores, and will be released this quarter. Looking at the performance metrics, a 2.4% increase in performance per watt and a 2.7% increase in performance per rack is predicted compared to previous models.
Granite Ridge processors will support the MXFP4 data format and greatly increase computational efficiency. Granite Ridge processors will provide up to a 6.5% reduction in next-token latency compared to fourth-generation Xeon processors that use FP16 precision. It will also be able to run complex Llama-2 models with 70 billion parameters in just 86 milliseconds.
In this way, Intel will use advanced semiconductor technologies to meet the increasing demands of modern data centers. Note that although the launch date of Granite Ridge processors is not specified, it is said that it will arrive immediately after the launch of the Sierra Forest processor.
